The present subject matter relates generally to systems and methods for selling portions of lottery tickets.
Lotteries are lucrative games for sponsors, as well as winners. Conventional lottery systems include a player purchasing a lottery ticket having a serial number that identifies the lottery ticket. On a drawing date, the lottery agency randomly selects at least one ticket number as the winning ticket number. The lottery tickets that match the winning ticket number are deemed the lottery winners and typically receive a prize of money.
Customers may want to purchase only a fraction of a ticket and split the winnings with the other owners of the ticket. However, lottery agencies typically only sell entire tickets. Lottery agencies and their systems and infrastructure have not previously been adapted to support a fractional lottery ticketing system.
In addition, dispensing and collecting coins at a typical retail point-of-sale terminal, is costly, burdensome, and inconvenient to both the merchants and the customers. Many customers would prefer to not receive coins as change. As a result, many customers may prefer fractional ownership of a lottery ticket to receiving change.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system that converts the change that would be given in a typical purchase transaction at a point-of-sale into fractional purchases of lottery tickets.